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The just-concluded annual meeting of ARPA-E, an agency founded to nurture interesting energy ideas that may or may not work, featured an exhibition hall with scores of displays staffed by hopeful entrepreneurs.

Many of them seemed to be Ph.D. engineers; in some cases, you needed a Ph.D. yourself to understand what was being presented. But here are three simpler ones that seemed enticing, even if their practicality has yet to be demonstrated.

Some bacteria and algae turn sunlight into oils that can be burned in a car engine or used as raw material at a refinery in place of crude oil. Yet production of reasonable quantities at a reasonable cost has so far been elusive. Tobacco, meanwhile, is easy to grow but has no healthy use. Can the two be merged?

The research consortium Folium (from the Latin word for leaf), which includes the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Kentucky, has taken genes from those types of bacteria and algae and inserted them into tobacco plants. In the first year of work, it produced a crop and then used organic solvents to extract the oils out of the leaves. (Check out the video above.)

Further work on the project, which received $4.8 million from ARPA-E, will determine whether the oils can be used directly as fuel or must go to a refinery. But the tobacco is already yielding one product that could substitute for diesel oil, said Peggy G. Lemaux, a researcher at Berkeley.

Making these oils from tobacco, as opposed to some other crops, would not interfere with food production, Dr. Lemaux noted. And tobacco is already in surplus because of the decline of the cigarette market, so a large infrastructure is already in place, she said.Read more…

Commuters awaiting a bus in New Delhi during the morning rush hour last month.Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The thick haze of outdoor air pollution common in India today is the nation’s fifth-largest killer, after high blood pressure, indoor air pollution (mainly from cooking fires), smoking and poor nutrition, according to a new analysis presented in New Delhi by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute. In 2010, outdoor air pollution contributed to over 620,000 premature deaths in India, up from 100,000 in 2000.

‘’It’s not just breathing bad air,’’ said Aaron Cohen, the principal epidemiologist at the institute. A host of diseases is related to air pollution, like cardiovascular diseases that lead to heart attacks and strokes, respiratory infections and lung cancer.

A satellite with new, far more powerful technology for monitoring the Earth’s changing climate, water supplies and agriculture will reach its orbit within two months, NASA says. [NASA]

Rain forest demolition, genetically modified ingredients, child labor: things to keep in mind when purchasing a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates for a loved one. [Grist]

The all-electric 2013 Honda Fit, first introduced in California and Oregon last summer, is coming to select East Coast markets this month. [Honda]

A quixotic map of a future high-speed rail network for the United States elicits an overwhelming response. The goal of the map, its creator at Berkeley says, was more about bridging regional and urban-rural divides than reducing airport congestion. [The Guardian]

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Imagine viewing the countryside while relaxing on a 14-hour train trip from Los Angeles to Chicago.Credit Alfred Twu

President Obama called for increased research to wean the country from oil dependence in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.Credit European Pressphoto Agency

In his State of the Union message on Tuesday night, President Obama proposed the creation of an “Energy Security Trust” to find alternatives to dependence on oil for the nation’s transportation needs. The trust would be financed from revenue from oil and gas royalties that the federal government collects from companies that drill on federal land.

As is customary in State of the Union speeches, Mr. Obama did not give much detail, but plenty of other voices were happy to fill in the blanks on Wednesday morning. The idea has obvious political appeal – using oil revenues to wean the country from oil – but it has a way to go before reaching fruition.

Securing America’s Future Energy, or SAFE, a group comprising retired admirals and generals and chief executives of major American companies, pointed out that it had recommended such a fund in December. Finding a stable long-term source of revenue would help address the need for funds for research and development, the group said.

Among the details unmentioned in Mr. Obama’s speech was money. SAFE said that $500 million would be a nice number but that it would settle for anywhere from $200 million to $500 million a year. Royalty revenues last year were around $5 billion, the group said.

But nobody seems clear on how much is spent on research on transportation alternatives now. Last year the government spent about $2.9 billion on energy research and development, SAFE said, but that sum includes nontransportation uses.

4:13 p.m. | Updated
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that the administration would ask Congress to direct $200 million a year to the fund for 10 years. That would be added to a existing research and development program at the Energy Department; in recent years the administration has been asking for $300 million for that program. While the money would be raised from oil and gas revenues and be spent to reduce oil use, the official said, some of it would be spent to increase natural gas use in vehicles.

A view of the Tianjin eco-city, which is still under construction in northeastern China.Credit Tianjin Eco-city

TIANJIN, China — Fifty years ago, during a time of food shortages, China’s young socialist government singled out a few farm villages as role models for the nation, saying that their high crop yields made them examples that other communities could learn from.

Today, facing challenges like runaway urbanization, soaring energy consumption and environmental degradation, China is hoping to establish a different set of paragons. With its cities expected to swell by another 350 million residents in the next 25 years, according to World Bank estimates, the government is scurrying to find sustainable urban solutions. To that end, China’s official news agency Xinhua has reported, it hopes to have 100 model cities, 200 model counties, 1,000 model districts and 10,000 model towns by 2015.

But already, some of the model cities mapped out early on, like Dongtan, an eco-city that was to house 500,000 people on Chongming Island near Shanghai, have been abandoned because of a range of problems like official corruption and confusion over how the projects would be financed.

Conversely, an eco-city in Tianjin created in concert with the government of Singapore is the latest, biggest and most successful of the projects to date. The Chinese government hopes that it will emerge as an economic powerhouse along the lines of regional agglomerations of cities in the Yangtze River and Pearl River Delta regions.Read more…

Drawing on data from 8,000 power plants, refineries and factories, the Environmental Protection Agency releases an interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011 from the nation’s biggest industrial polluters. Emissions dipped from the previous year, largely because of a shift away from reliance on coal-fired power plants. [Environmental Protection Agency]

The Fish and Wildlife Service rejects a land swap that would have allowed a controversial road to cut through a remote wildlife refuge in Alaska. State officials protest the decision, which they say will prevent residents from traveling to seek medical care in bad weather. [Reuters]

One hundred electric vehicles will join United Postal Service’s trademark brown vans in what the company describes as the biggest corporate roll-out of zero-emissions vehicles ever in California. [The Miami Herald]

Nearly two years after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a boat washes ashore in central Oregon that appears to be debris from the event. Biologists say the boat does not seem to pose a risk of introducing invasive species. [Associated Press]

StubHub sells gift certificates that recipients can use to buy tickets for just about any sport and many cultural events.Credit StubHub

Consume, consume, consume. That message is about as easy to ignore this time of year as the sight of a plump, red-suited man tromping over a crest of new-fallen snow.

For Christmas celebrants who heed their consumption of energy, water and other natural resources throughout the year, the annual gift-giving bonanza can induce guilt. For many others, the promotion of supposedly eco-friendly gifts can seem contradictory (buy stuff to go green?), self-righteous or simply unappealing.

“Is it better to regift, or buy a new gift? It’s better to regift. They all know that.” says Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Oakland, Calif. Still, he said, “People hear that and it sounds like someone is trying to sell them austerity.”

But less than a week before Christmas, you can still find gifts that are both enjoyable and on the greener side. And you can even feel good about having procrastinated: driving all over town or ordering items from halfway around the globe would have added to the emissions associated with transportation, after all.Read more…

Americans may be buying more compact fluorescent light bulbs these days, but they are less likely to set their thermostats low during the winter than they were four years ago and have less confidence that their actions will help to curb global warming, according to a new survey.

The survey, published this week, also suggests that doubt is growing that even widespread concerted action can make a difference when it comes to climate change.

Sixty percent said energy-saving habits could help curb climate change if they were adopted by most Americans, down from 78 percent in 2008; those who say they believe that warming can be slowed by changes in personal habits across the industrialized world dropped to 70 percent from 85 percent over the same period.Read more…

Associated PressA dockhand used a stick to measure how far a barge had settled into the water as it was loaded with soybeans at a terminal in Sauget, Ill., last month.

Barge operators prepare to begin blasting large rock formations that are impeding navigation south of St. Louis on the Mississippi River, where water levels are 20 feet lower than normal because of a prolonged drought. Meanwhile, 40 representatives of government, business and labor meet to address the challenge of keeping the river open. Over the weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water into the river from Carlyle Lake in southern Illinois. [The Chicago Tribune, The News-Democrat]

A wave of early retirements resulting from new federal rules is expected to create staffing strains in the management of parks and preserves in Alaska, which occupy hundreds of millions of acres of public land. [The New York Times]

A sustainability group sues the federal government over its oil and gas leasing program for the Outer Continental Shelf, saying that a flawed economic analysis led it to rush ahead with leases that may not be economically justified. [Center for Sustainable Economy]

While global climate change was the primary driver of fluctuations in the panda population for millions of years, human activities probably underlie the recent decline, genetic researchers report. [Asian Scientist]

The Nature ConservancyPeter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy is among those who advocates “a new environmentalism.”

A growing group of “modernist greens” aims to shift the environmental movement’s focus away from nature and its fragility. (What’s your view, readers?) [Slate]

The British government lifts a moratorium on fracking, saying that companies can resume their exploration of shale gas reserves. A halt was imposed last year after two small earthquakes in Lancashire. [CNN]

New data show an upward bump in mass transit use in the United States in the first three quarters of this year. Light and heavy rail saw the biggest increases. [Grist]

Florida plans to open a Burmese python hunting contest next month to slow the spread of the snake, an invasive nonnative species. The state Fish and Wildlife Commission will award $1,500 to the hunter who harvests the most pythons and $1,000 to the hunter who catches the longest one. The snakes are thought to have been released into the wild by people who bought them as exotic pets; the biggest captured so far in Florida was 17 feet long. [The Jacksonville Oserver]

In a move that is drawing qualified praise from environmentalists, Texas’s oil and gas regulatory agency is updating its rules to address the entire process of hydraulic fracturing, a controversial natural gas drilling method. [The Texas Tribune]

A high-level team of negotiators meets on Wednesday in Montreal to seek a solution to the impasse between the European Union and non-European nations on a plan to charge foreign air carriers for the emissions they generate when flying into or out of European airports. [Reuters]

A report estimates that China is playing a role in building 306 hydroelectric projects across 70 nations. While electricity from hydropower is described as clean energy, the dams can have major environmental impacts. Nearly half are planned in Southeast Asia. [Mongabay.com]

A brutal drought has battered sheep ranchers in Colorado and raised questions about their operations’ long-term viability. [The New York Times]

This year Arctic sea ice reached a historic low, breaking a record set in 2007 by a whopping 18 percent. Researchers suggest that the ice could disappear entirely in as little as two or three decades. That would accelerate the warming of the planet, given that dark solar-energy-absorbing ocean water would replace a surface of bright white ice, which reflects sunlight back into space.

Air traffic is the biggest source of pollution in the Arctic. Ever since cross-polar flights became commonplace in the late 1990s, flights crossing the Arctic Circle have risen steadily, surpassing 50,000 in 2010.

While cross-polar flights account for only a tiny percent of total global emissions from aviation, the standard cruising altitude for commercial planes in the Arctic is the stratosphere, an extremely stable layer of the atmosphere. Black carbon and other emissions get trapped in this layer and as a result remain in the atmosphere longer, causing far more damage than emissions from flights at lower latitudes, scientists say.

But with some creative detours, airlines can buy a little more time for Arctic sea ice, a new study suggests.Read more…

The Environmental Protection Agency just upheld its renewable fuel standard, rejecting a request from some states that the ethanol requirement for gasoline be waived. The agency said it found no evidence to support a finding of severe “economic harm” that would warrant granting a waiver.4:27 p.m. | Updated Matthew L. Wald’s story is here.

Getty ImagesCars waiting to refuel last weekend at the Armory in Staten Island’s Midland section.

Nearly a week after New Jersey announced one, a gasoline rationing system is imposed in New York City and on Long Island. Drivers with plates ending in odd and even numbers will buy gas on alternate days. (A letter will count as an odd number.) Supplies have been disrupted by Hurricane Sandy, although the problem is easing. [ABC News]

Now that President Obama is assured of a second term, environmentalists renew their quest to persuade him to veto construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. [InsideClimate News]

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How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.